One of the most insightful pieces I have readon the death of Charlie Kirk is from Mary Geddry's Substack, Geddry's Newsletter, Mary Geddry is a writer and publisher focused on politics, economics, and climate justice, whose daily roundups challenge authoritarian power with sharp analysis and satire.
She gave me permission to reprint this here.
Charlie Kirk is dead, killed by a bullet fired from 200 yards away as he sat on stage at Utah Valley University, still mid-argument about transgender people and mass shootings. The shot rang out just after noon, in broad daylight, during one of his American Comeback Tour stops, where he thrived on sparring with students under the banner of Prove Me Wrong. The distance, the vantage point from a nearby building, and the precision of the hit all point toward premeditation. This was not a chaotic eruption but a calculated assassination.
It is impossible to write about Charlie Kirks death without also writing about Charlie Kirks life. At thirty-one, he had already built himself into one of the most visible and polarizing figures on the American right. He founded Turning Point USA at eighteen, and over the next decade transformed it into a campus empire flush with donor cash and a pipeline into conservative media. By 2019, TPUSA was reporting nearly thirty million dollars in annual revenue, and Kirk himself was drawing a six-figure salary. Between his podcast, his book deals, his speaking fees, and his Arizona estate, he was a millionaire many times over before he turned thirty. His fortune was not built on invention, art, or even policy. It was built on division, on turning marginalized groups into punching bags for applause lines and fundraising drives.
Kirk's career was a long rehearsal of contempt: immigrants painted as invaders, LGBTQ+ Americans as predators, unhoused people as moral failures. He honed a style that was not about persuasion but humiliation, delighting in exposing the vulnerability of students who dared challenge him at his campus debates. His followers saw him as fearless, a truth-teller willing to say what others wouldnt. His critics saw a demagogue in a tailored suit, profiting from cruelty and cultivating an audience addicted to outrage.
And now, in a cruel symmetry, the man who trafficked in cultural fear and suspicion has died in an act of political violence. Whether the shooter was driven by ideology, grievance, or some darker instability, Kirks end forces us to confront the reality that America is drowning in guns and grievance. Nearly 46,700 Americans died from gun-related injuries in 2023. Most were suicides, but over 17,000 were homicides. Mass shootings have become so routine that one in fifteen Americans has personally witnessed one. The U.S. Surgeon General last year declared gun violence a public health emergency, a designation usually reserved for pandemics and opioids. The numbers are staggering, but so too is the atmosphere of anxiety: every public gathering now carries the shadow of what might happen if someone with a rifle, a grudge, and an open line of sight decides to make their mark. For years, Kirk told audiences that the real threats to American safety came from immigrants crossing the border, from woke teachers in classrooms, from transgender people demanding recognition. He cast suspicion downward, toward the vulnerable. Yet the violence that killed him came not from the communities he vilified but from the same climate of fear, rage, and easy access to firearms that he helped cultivate. The irony is bitter. The consequences are not confined to him.
None of this is to suggest that Charlie Kirk deserved to die. Political murder is abhorrent, no matter the target, and his death is a tragedy for his family, his supporters, and for a nation already staggering under the weight of polarization. But it would also be dishonest to ignore the legacy he leaves behind. He normalized contempt as a political strategy. He made his wealth and his name by teaching others to scorn those who were different, to view the poor, the queer, the immigrant, as objects of ridicule rather than fellow citizens, or hell, fellow human beings.
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